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Temporal Modelling and the Call for Responsibility in Lee Maracle's

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Temporal Modelling and the Call for Responsibility in Lee Maracle's “Magic Moments”: Temporal Modelling and the Call for Responsibility in Lee Maracle’s Daughters are Forever Elizabeth Jackson Marilyn thought it interesting that Elsie spoke in the present whether the event she was referring to was in the past or present. Maybe it was for Elsie the difference between active and inactive. — Daughters are Forever (215) his essay’s engagement with Lee Maracle’s Daughters are Forever is motivated by my curiosity about how literary representations of historical events, particularly their con- Tfigurations of time, work to compose and communicate their own distinct conceptualizations of history and temporality. The historical and temporal models offered by a text provide a conceptual map or philosophical schema that can inform a careful, deliberately empathetic engagement with the worlds and perspectives of — and beyond — the reading experience. Beliefs about time and history substantially influ- ence cultural politics — or the ways in which we understand our rela- tionships to others (whether these others are times, places, or people). For this reason, attending to alternate temporal and historical models offers the possibility that readers will rethink their relationships with, and responsibilities toward, events, situations, and people beyond the scope of their own direct experiences. Unlike many novels, which present their ideas about time tenta- tively and implicitly, Daughters are Forever is direct and self-conscious about its conceptualizations of time and history. For example, much of its plot centres on the struggle of the protagonist, Marilyn, with the repeated “gapping” that sees her losing her grip on events in her present and undergoing vivid memories and journeys through moments in her past. She spends much of the book musing on the nature and function of time and experiencing the slippery borders between past and present. Events from the past sometimes “repeat” and directly affect charac- Lee Maracle 227 ters living a hundred years or more after a first occurrence. Memory- based experience plays a key role in the narrative’s “present,” and dead ancestors appear to Marilyn to pass along words of advice or guide her through places from her past that she needs to revisit on the path to personal healing and maturity. In the world of this novel, the past is an active figure in the present, and this active presence is an explicit and central tenet. The novel lays out its historical and temporal models in plain sight, offering them for our consideration and possible edification. Marilyn is a Salish woman whose own experience of having her child apprehended motivates her social work with other Indigenous women whose children have been or might soon be seized by the Children’s Aid Society. Her reflections on her client Elsie’s manner of speaking, which I have used as my epigraph, reveal her own growing awareness that, in many ways, the past can be a stronger presence and exert more influence than the actions and interactions of a person’s daily life. To live in ways that “open her up to her own pathways” (Daughters 242), Marilyn must reckon with her individual and cultural pasts — includ- ing a cultural history of European colonialism and genocide; a child- hood of abuse at the hands of her stepfather; and her struggles as an adult with an often absent, neglectful husband, with alcohol abuse, and with her own violence toward her daughters. She must put her learning and experiences to use in creating the future she desires. Hers is not a solo journey: many others — including ancestors, community, and most pressingly her daughters — are also crucial to the process. As the novel’s title indicates, this is a multi-generational effort involving figures from the time before she was born and also affecting those who will follow. This process is not an easy one for Marilyn, and she is profoundly perturbed by the interactions and events that enable her to start to heal, particularly by her visions and movements into the past, which are orchestrated and prompted by Westwind. This gapping, so named because it creates gaps in her experience of the present, takes her deeply into and across moments from her past; each moment is experienced viscerally and acutely, and particularly at first, Marilyn feels that she has “lost her capacity to differentiate between past and current time” (64). While my reading of this novel’s temporal model celebrates its potential to create links between past and present, and thus to possibly spur ethical action on the part of readers, it is important to note that these slippages and gappings are not experienced with pleasure or hope 228 Scl/Élc by Marilyn. Indeed, she is disoriented and troubled by them and seeks desperately to cling to the certainty and solidity that measured time can offer. As the narrator explains, “Time is a critical illusion. The separation of moments in time defines sanity. Marilyn searched about for a way to locate herself somewhere in time. She needed time’s clarity and differentiation but it eluded her” (64). Early in the novel, Marilyn’s emergence from one of these breaks with linear temporality is a relief, helping to break a “bitter, destructive cycle going on inside her” (65). Witnessing Elsie’s daughter’s death play out inside a case file photo, she calls “to no one” to “spare me, I’m hallucinating” (44); she has no belief in a being upon whom to call and knows no other name for what she is experiencing. Indeed, part of what Maracle’s text critiques is Western psychia- try’s attempts to dismiss or discount experiences that do not fall easily into conventional Western categories of real/unreal, sane/insane. As Sylvie Vranckx rightly notes, “In Daughters, Marilyn is too terrified to delve into the meaning of her visions, as the only instrument that ‘her Western education’ has provided her to understand her experience is the vocabulary of hallucinations and psychosis” (41). Later on, submerged in layered moments of childhood abuse and her own violence toward her daughters, she again pleads to be released, saying that she “can’t afford another breakdown” (111). It is significant that Maracle’s text does not ask readers to decide whether its protagonist’s strange experi- ences are manifestations of mental illness or important insights: from the outset of the novel, the omniscient narrator shows us that this is Marilyn’s reality and that there are greater forces at work in bringing her these thoughts, words, and experiences. Her personal struggles are a legitimate and important part of a bigger cultural and cosmic picture of continuous suffering, remembering, and healing. Crucially, this novel is not — or not only — a Bildungsroman depicting an individual’s quest or journey to maturity: for Marilyn, and I would argue for most people, healing can never be an isolated, personal process. For Indigenous peo- ple, one can argue that “healing requires personal and family cleansing of unresolved grief, loss, historical trauma, shame, and fear” (Labun and Emblen 209). This is why Marilyn’s daughters, ancestors, friends, and memories are all part of her healing process. Perhaps the biggest strength of this text’s articulation of temporality is that it draws upon a tradition of thought that has been developed and Lee Maracle 229 articulated independent of the Euro-Canadian philosophies that have shaped dominant ideas about time, history, and social responsibility. Drawing on a rich tradition of Indigenous cosmology to articulate her ways of seeing and being enables Maracle to offer sustained, nuanced historical and temporal models for consideration. Marilyn is Salish, and it seems that the creation story that opens the text, as well as the winds and other forces that work with her throughout it, find their roots in Salish tradition and myth. �����������������������������������������Maracle’s longstanding commitment to cul- tural activism in Indigenous communities and to re-telling traditional myths (see Cooper) gives her a large range of conceptual tools with which to work. It is stimulating and heartening to read the novel’s matter-of-fact expositions on time’s function as “a critical illusion” (64, 141), as well as its descriptions of the ways in which memory, figures from the past, and spiritual forces can act upon a person by grasping or releasing her thoughts (see 17, 44, 109-11). Many of the concepts laid out in the text can be heartily integrated as I seek literary criticism and pedagogical theory that ethically reconceptualize humans’ relationship to the past and responsibility to the present and future. At the same time, I am keenly aware of the danger of engaging in uncritical, ignorant celebra- tion of the text without giving Maracle’s ideas the due respect of care- ful listening and active engagement, particularly given the “outsider” context from which I am reading. In her work on reconstructing Indigenous women’s identities, Kim Anderson describes many non-Indigenous critics’ approaches to Indigenous literature as enacting “a modern-day colonial process,” involving acts of cultural appropriation and of “eating the Other” (44). Even when motivations are committedly anti-oppressive, non-Indigen- ous critics’ work is often compromised. Daniel Coleman describes the challenges of what he calls “epistemological cross-talk” as often being rooted in ignorance, some of it necessary: For there are domains of spiritual knowledge and ceremonial prac- tice that Indigenous peoples do not wish to expose to the inquiries of non-Indigenous academics, and this means that epistemological cross-talk of the sort I am venturing here must remain inevit- ably partial and limited. Nonetheless, I argue that partial and limited perspectives, even if not fully elaborated or explainable, 230 Scl/Élc serve the crucial function of loosening the strangle-hold of Euro- Enlightenment’s cognitive imperialism.
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